Stuart Maclure - Böcker

"Learning to Think: Thinking to Learn" has grown out of a conference organized by the OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI) in July 1989. Its purpose is to discuss and advance the state of knowledge about how young people think and reason. Thinking is a normal activity for every normal human being, ordinary life depends on our ability to think. Thus the prime objectives of formal education in all disciplines have always been the refining and shaping of the powers of thought. This book explores three broad ways of thinking in the context of education, looking firstly at the 'skills' approach, secondly at the 'infusion model' and thirdly at the belief that the traditional disciplines and pedagogy of education already provide for the development of thinking.

Curriculum development occupied an increasingly important place on the educational scene in the mid 1960s, foreshadowing much of the national debate initiated by the Prime Minister of Britain in late 1976. The agencies for development take different forms in different countries, but the underlying issues are remarkably similar across the globe. It is the basic framework common to all planned curriculum change which The Politics of Curriculum Change (originally published in 1978) is concerned to bring into sharper focus.A major consideration in embarking on or analysing any curriculum programme is the extent to which it reflects public concerns about education. The notion of the ‘public curriculum’ is a central strand in the authors’ argument. It leads naturally into a discussion of mechanisms for control and development, and the political acceptability of new proposals to teachers, parents, pupils, and the public at large. But curriculum change has its internal, as well as its external politics. These are reflected in the contrasting styles of development, varied forms of evaluation, and in the conflicting response of the profession, both to change of the curriculum as a whole, and to a piecemeal subject-by-subject approach. The authors give these working aspects of curriculum development as careful attention as they afford to the larger issues of schooling in society.All in all, this book offers a view which has not hitherto been clearly articulated, but which is essential to understanding what curriculum development is all about. Its authors are in a good position to do this: one had a particularly close involvement with the external, and the other with the internal politics of development, and they previously worked together on an international study of curriculum.